"Leon Forrest was the author of four novels that effectively created an oral history of his mythical territory of Forrest County, which strongly resembles Chicago. In the first three works - There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), and Two Wings to Veil My Face (1984) - he explored the spiritual core of African American experience through the blending of mythic, biblical, folk, and Shakespearean discourses. His last novel, Divine Days (1992), was consciously modeled on James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of its ambition to articulate the essence of a culture in a massive work designed, as Forrest phrases it in this interview, to be the 'Great World Novel.' He also published a collection of essays, Relocations of the Spirit, in 1994. This interview was conducted in Chicago in 1995, roughly two years before Leon Forrest died of prostate cancer on November 6, 1997."